With this year’s 2006 Software Defined Radio Forum just around the corner, we thought it would be an interesting retrospective to look at last year’s SDRF keynote speech. Executive Toney Prather shared the stage with a number of deep, technical briefings and used Texas humor to woo the crowd from the entirely theoretical, to his company’s hugely successful deployed SDR equipment. Mid-Tex services a rural area with entrenched competitors such as Sprint, Verizon, T Mobile, Nextel, (now owned by Sprint) and Cingular. Their strategy is to easily roll out new services such as picture phones, reality TV voting, and concierge-type services.

Mid-Tex Cellular is using SDR in their basestation, using software developed by Vanu, Inc. Mid-Tex Cellular is overlaying its existing TDMA-based wireless network with a new GSM/GPRS-based system using HP servers and Vanu software.